With the developers over at Wolcen Studio working on the first content patch for their Early Access hack 'n' slash action-RPG Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, the game's latest Kickstarter updates reflect that by showing off Wolcen's new skills and environments and talking about the game's passive skill tree.

Here's an excerpt from the second update:

Designing the Passive Skill Tree

We want the Passive Skill Tree to allow several options:

Make a straight-forward archetype by following conspicuous paths

Refine passive skills according to your attacks and spells (and their modifiers)

Build around itemization and unique items (more advanced)

Therefore, we keep these 3 elements in mind when we design something for the Passive Skill Tree, Active Skill Tree, or even Unique items. It’s very important for us to have synergy between all of this to bring depth and interest to the game.

One of the most important and tricky things is to allow various kinds of builds to travel through most of the themed section without feeling they “wasted points”. We also want you to make choices and don’t feel forced to take certain paths, even if there will be very powerful nodes for some build types.

For instance, if I want to build a character based on daggers and toxic ailment, I can either choose to focus on the rogue-themed sections and have something that works well, or explore the Cabalist section and specialize the character into ailment damage and application.

Here is an example of a possible build if I play daggers with a toxic ailment specialization.

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This is only one of the many builds that you will be able to make. The choices you make might vary according to your defense system as well; someone who chooses to have a Force Shield based defense will not choose the same paths as someone else who chooses Health or Resistance.

We will share more of these examples on Twitter, Discord, and Reddit before the patch is out so don’t hesitate to follow us on the social media linked at the end of the news to see more about the Passive Skill Tree in Content Patch 1.